A completely different (non-technical) short post today. I recently delivered another successful Delphix training course for a large corporate customer and specifically for their global support team in Pune, India (actually there were six from the support team plus one from their build team and one from the core engineering team). That’s another eight Delphix experts created!
Continue reading “Another Successful Delphix Training Course Delivered”
The DataOps movement is certainly gaining momentum and, as a key supporting tool, the Delphix Dynamic Data Platform (DDDP) is quickly growing with it. More and more large enterprises are deploying tens or even hundreds of Delphix engines throughout their data centres in all parts of the world. With that comes the inevitable challenge of managing such an estate and specifically with Delphix, as an example, managing system configurations, user accounts and privileges that are locally configured on each engine becomes unwieldy and time consuming. For instance, the enterprise may have a global support model with a dedicated team of support engineers who look after the day to day running of the estate. The support team take on a new engineer who needs access to every engine to perform their role and we really don’t want to manually access each engine individually to add a new support user account.
In this post I’m going to look at one way of creating a centralised management solution for such a scenario. It can then be developed further to achieve much more, such as mass deployment of source and target environment configurations, dSources, VDB’s and any other object management requirements you may have. Continue reading “Managing Large Delphix DDP Estates”
As a follow on from the GDPR For Non-production Environments post and to give an insight in how to use the basic functionality of Delphix Masking I thought I would write this post in the format of a demonstration. It’s a demo I give to the DBA’s and Application Specialists that attend the Delphix training courses I teach before they get their hands dirty and do it themselves in the labs.
Warning: this is a very screenshot heavy post!
Delphix data virtualization can provide the solution to numerous use cases for the provision and consumption of data and when you begin to work with the product you can find yourself coming up with all kinds of weird and wonderful ways to utilize its functionality often replacing existing costly solutions and doing so quickly.
Here’s a use case you may not have thought of, or at least you didn’t when you virtualized and provisioned your first VDB or vFile.
Warning: this post is a little more wordy than usual!
Continue reading “Recovery From Logical Data Corruption Using Delphix”
Following on from the post covering the new version 5.2 Delphix Management Interface I now need to write a part II to the Faults post, which explained the difference between ignoring and resolving faults in the Delphix virtualization engine and how to fix an accidentally ignored fault in versions prior to 5.2. As I explained there, we needed to use the CLI where we could switch the fault to resolved, which would have the effect of the fault being alerted again if it occurred. Now in Delphix 5.2 we can do this through the redesigned (and renamed) Management Interface.
The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into effect in May of 2018 and businesses who collect, use, and share data from European citizens – whether based in the EU or not – will have to comply or risk some pretty heavy punishment (up to EUR20m or 4% of annual worldwide turnover!). So how can the GDPR affect companies current processes when copying and moving data into non-production environments?
For every production system there can be tens of non-production database copies used to support the ongoing development and testing of that production system. In my 15+ years of working with databases in various industries I have rarely seen effective and secure processes to desensitize data when copying the production source to these supporting environments. To be fair, recent years have shown an improvement here but seldom enough and often the process is more of a token gesture to put a tick in a box, rather than a clear concerted effort to ensure the data is completely desensitized and importantly, certified to be so. That can’t be the case anymore.
Lets take a look at what impact GDPR has on this process and how the Delphix Dynamic Data Platform is a good example of a tool businesses can use to achieve compliance.
Delphix version 5.2 has recently been released and with it a complete new look and feel to the virtualization engine GUI. Finally the guys at Delphix have completely removed Flash from the front end, a welcome relief, and with it have taken the opportunity to redesign the interface to make it cleaner, more modern and intuitive. It’s been a long time coming but is it an improvement?
Vs 
Jet Stream has some great features for the end user (data consumer), one of which is the ability to undo the last operation in certain situations. There’s also a reset button on the main toolbar which, if I’m honest, I haven’t really had much call for and do wonder if anyone actually uses.
Here I want to explain the difference between the two features and ensure you don’t misunderstand them and leave your environment in a state you didn’t intend, which I’ve seen happen before.
Faults in the Delphix virtualisation engine are automatically generated when a problem occurs and generally mean something is broken. They will be categorised as WARNING or CRITICAL and require some human intervention to fix.
When a fault occurs the GUI will show a red ‘Fault’ link in the top right part of the screen.
Clicking the link will open a small window where you can browse each active fault and further Ignore or Resolve them, or even Mark All Resolved. But when should you ignore a fault, when should you resolve a fault and when should you resolve ALL the faults, and what are you actually doing by ignoring and resolving?
I experienced a situation (several times) a while back with the GUI in the virtualisation engine where it became unresponsive and would eventually die in the browser. The symptoms occurred when the engine was reclaiming a large amount of space after removing some objects, mainly large dSources. Obviously I wanted to get to the bottom of why it was happening so raised a support ticket, however, as I’m sure you know, the first thing you do after raising a ticket with Delphix Support is to generate and upload a support bundle. You’ve probably guessed the problem here… how can I generate a support bundle when the GUI isn’t working?